Solids passing thhrough each other without friction
[Article begins with discussion about superfluid helium and BECs.]
… What about solids? Can they “flow” without friction? Last year Moses Chan (Penn State) announced the results of an experiment in which solid helium-4 was revolved like a merry-go-round. It appeared that when the bulk was revolved at least part of the solid remained stationary. In effect part of the solid was passing through the rest of the solid without friction…
Cryovolcanism
| All too frequently do we fail to recognise ice as a mineral because it does not behave as we believe conventional rocks and minerals should. We are brought up from an early age with an almost magical awe of this substance, which forms sparkly icicles and glittering snowflakes, and is great fun to slide on. Yet water ice is among the most important rock forming minerals in the solar system. Its behaviour as a crystalline solid and as polycrystalline aggregates (i.e., rocks) are indistinguishable from the materials which we, as geologists, are familiar with; it is simply the case that, on Earth, it exists closer to its melting point than, for example, silicates. In the frigid outer solar system, however, ice finds its true home as a substance from which mountains and canyons are built and, perhaps, from which dunes, beaches, and deltas are constructed (e.g., Whalley, 1985).
By direct analogy with terrestrial igneous processes we would therefore refer to a melt of the native rocks as a magma. On icy satellites this magma will consist mainly of water, with admixtures of ammonia. Like terrestrial vents these fluids will construct volcanic edifices such as shields and domes, complete with flow fields, and also form intrusive bodies such as sills and dykes. The accepted term for these fluids is cryomagma and the eruptive process, cryovolcanism. |
Making multimiedia easy again
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
That’s all you had to do to get a screen 320×200 with 256 colors on the PC under DOS. One big linear array, no color planes, pure and simple. I thought those days were gone forever until I found LibSDL:
Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of “Civilization: Call To Power.”
Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Windows, BeOS, MacOS Classic, MacOS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. There is also code, but no official support, for Windows CE, AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, NetBSD, AIX, OSF/Tru64, RISC OS, and SymbianOS.
SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, Java, Lua, ML, Perl, PHP, Pike, Python, and Ruby.
Chickenscratch
Omniglot has every abjad, alphabet, syllabic alphabet, and syllabary ever in common use; samples of logographic, ideographic, and semantic-phonetic compounds; alternative writing systems (generally phoenetic systems for English, but also includes ones used in TV & movies); and new ones made up by fans of the site.
Mathematics as punishment in the New Testament
1 NOW about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church.
2 And he killed James the brother of John with the sword.
3 And because he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded further to take Peter also. (Then were the days of unleavened bread.)
4 And when he had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions…
(Acts 12:1-4)
Am Ha-Aphar
The science of forecasting dust storms, with a really neat animation of how dust devils work.
Way to go
Gizmag’s got a feature showing the top 50 articles in Motorcycles. Cool stuff like the Bombardier Embrio and Tommy Forsgren’s Hermes.
My favorite, though, wasn’t directly featured. It’s the RIOT Wheel. I would love to drive one of these to work.
reperiendi 
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